Dynamic Opacity Optimization for Scatter Plots

Abstract

Scatterplots are an effective and commonly used technique to show the relationship between two variables. However, as the number of data points increases, the chart suffers from “over-plotting” which obscures data points and makes the underlying distribution of the data difficult to discern. Reducing the opacity of the data points is an effective way to address over-plotting, however, setting the individual point opacity is a manual task performed by the chart designer. We present a user-driven model of opacity scaling for scatter plots. We built our model based on crowd-sourced responses to opacity scaling tasks using several synthetic data distributions, and then test our model on a collection of real-world data sets.